Recognizing an environmental crisis, Eyebeam recently launched an "Eco-Vis Challenge" to address not only the ecological problems at stake, but also what they refer to as an "environmental data crisis." The organizers of the program, who include Eyebeam Fellows Michael Mandiberg, Brooke Singer, and Ben Engebreth, felt that many people are often overwhelmed by dense statistics related to the situation and their call was for artists and technologists to collaborate on two design challenges. The first was to create "Eco Icons" that "make visible environmental or ecological concerns" by engaging "the politics of information and the persuasion of graphics" and the second was to create an "eco-visualizer" that relies on one set of geological impact data and suggests alternative frameworks for viewing the information. Eyebeam has recently announced the finalists of these challenges and their projects are compelling. On view through January 26 in their exhibition, Feedback, are the top entrants in the Eco-Icons category. Here, visitors will see works like Oz Etzioni's symbol for unrecyclable material, which borrows from the visual language of its inverse, or Forays' "Edible Excess" decal, intended to help "urban foragers" locate free food among your disposals. The playfully informative Eco-Visualizers will be on view in March. This is all part of Eyebeam's "Beyond Light Bulbs" series, which suggests that we can all do more to help the world. - Marisa Olson

The Wa-KOW! Collective was founded on the idea that the distinctions between artistic media are problematic and productive rather than essential. Their primary goal is to find ways to blur those boundaries. The group--made up of poets, musicians, and photographers--works in and around the borders between text, sound, and image, exploring the relations between the three media and the nature of each type of media. Their artistic process evolved through organic collaboration. They visited specific sites in Tulsa and collected raw materials through writing, audio recording, and photography. The group then altered, edited, and arranged these materials, meanwhile incorporating samples from songs, films, texts and images related to Tulsa. The result of this collaboration is "Tulsita," an online flash-based environment that explores the cultural, ethical, and aesthetic experiences they have had living in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Panoplie.org is a French "web magazine" which, true to its name displays a great diversity of projects. The site is run by a collective of artists and "aims to be a platform for exchange between artists and Net surfers." The group highlights emergent, risk-taking practices while also collaborating with art institutions and galleries to broaden the horizons of "traditional art" discourse reflected on the site and, in turn, presented in these spaces. Panoplie is particularly interested in internet-based work and has recently been commissioning online performances that challenge the artists and push the medium. The organizers kindly leave the question of archiving webstreams of live works to the artists, in an effort to free them up and give them permission to fail, but recent works by MTAA, Igor Stromajer, and Anne Laforet are all preserved online. Up next is Helen Varley Jamieson's piece, "a gesture through the flames." On Monday January 28 at 8pm (Paris local time), the Australian writer, theater practitioner, and digital artist will begin broadcasting a performance that "will touch on the impossibility of having a frank conversation about loneliness with the dead." That sounds challenging, indeed! The piece is the last installment in Breaking Solitude, a project of artist and Panoplie co-organizer Annie Abrahams. - Marisa Olson

fighting the flames(2006) by tyler coburn
00:06:00 / NYC and London
October 2006/ DV NTSC

Synopsis: Taking its title from a popular spectacle of early-20th Century Coney Island, in which a building was daily set ablaze and extinguished by a fleet of firemen, "Fighting the Flames" examines mass entertainment's ongoing propensity to link terror with amusement.

Baltimore Shopping Network is artist Jimmy Joe Roche's hilarious parody of a home shopping network. Goofy salesmen host the videos, which advertise ludicrous items such as beef "with chiller crystals", a wig "you don't need to feed!", and an "excalaber". Baltimore Shopping Network, presented as a YouTube page, is a humorous commentary on the absurdity of American consumerism. Roche is a member of the Baltimore-based art collective Wham City!

The following are online and offline projects which have been circulating in various online communities. They are gathered here in no particular order.

P2P Art - The aesthetics of ephemerality by Anders Weberg
Art made for - and only available on - the peer to peer networks. The original artwork is first shared by the artist until one other user has downloaded it. After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it.
The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist.

Webyarns.com by Alan Bigelow
A collection of works created over the past few years consisting of digital stories for the web. These stories are created in Flash and use images, text, audio, video, and other components. They are created expressly for viewing on the web, although they can be (and have been) shown as gallery installations.

Creative Capital is a New York City-based organization that "acts as a catalyst for the development of adventurous and imaginative ideas" by providing grants to individual artists. The organization is known for its emphasis on innovative art forms and the non-financial ways, such as workshops, it supports artists throughout the grant cycle. In 2008, Creative Capital will fund in the areas of emerging fields (take note, dear readers), innovative literature and performing arts. See below for how each category is defined according to the Creative Capital website:

Emerging Fields may include all forms of digital arts, audio work, multidisciplinary projects and new genres.

Innovative Literature may include poetry, fiction, nonfiction, as well as genre-defying work by writers who demonstrate exceptional stylistic, linguistic, and formal originality.

Every January the streets of Park City, Utah become clogged with actors, producers, directors and studio executives in town for the country's most visible showcase for independent film, the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance has long been known for its independent spirit, and this year's featured exhibition demonstrates its ongoing interest in experimental forms of moving image and electronic art. Entitled "New Frontier on Main", the program presents a line-up of installations, screenings and performances by a diverse group of filmmakers and media artists. Chinese video artist Yang Fudong's sublime work, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest Parts 1-5 (2007) employs traditional Chinese aesthetic and narrative forms to examine the role of the intellectual in China's contemporary ideological landscape. Computer animations by Jennifer Steinkamp and Marina Zurkow present an open-ended meditation on our ever-changing natural landscape. For Mike Kelly (2007), Steinkamp employs her signature wall-to-wall projections to render trees seemingly blown by a multi-directional wind. In Zurkow's works The Poster Children (2007) and Children of the Revolution (2007), pre-pubescent girls wander through a rapidly melting arctic landscape with polar bears and floating piles of discarded electronics. Performance also plays a large role in New Frontiers' offerings. Highlights include a screening of animator Brent Green's signature dark, eerily playful stop-motion animations alongside a live score provided by his band Calitone, as well as a screening of Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad’s Super Mario Movie(2005) accompanied by a live performance. (Unable to attend, Arcangel performed from his home in Brooklyn, live-broadcast from his bed.) The exhibition's impressive roster also includes Doug Aiken, Robert Boyd, Jim Campbell, Cause Collective, Hasan Elahi, Braden King and Shahzad Ismaily, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid and Stephanie Rothenburg & Jeff Crouse- all artists selected by the festival ...

The Transborder Immigrant Tool uses GPS-enabled mobile phones to help immigrants crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. Artist Ricardo Dominguez has combined an inexpensive mobile phone with built-in GPS and visual navigation tools to produce a device intended to reduce the number of deaths that occur each year among the thousands of migrants who try to cross from Mexico into the United States. The phone has a visual system that works like a compass and helps immigrants locate resources such as water caches, safety beacons and highways by vibrating when within a certain proximities.

The project is in its first phase, but Dominguez hopes to have 500 phones ready for distribution through workshops by the end of the year.